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Introduction to “Life Lessons”

Life Lessons204 words1 minutes to read

As I’ve watched my children grow, I’ve started collecting a list of little bits of wisdom that I want to pass along to my kids.

For a number of years now, I’ve been taking notes. Sometimes these notes are funny, sometimes endearing, and sometimes very serious. But all of these notes are about experiences from my own life where I’ve learned something valuable. Baz Luhrmann is credited as the writer of a song called Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen. Toward the end of the song, it says:

“Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”

So today, I’ve decided to take my list of notes, pick one of the topics to write about, and start a new category on my blog called “Life Lessons”. These are letters and lessons written to my children. I don’t know when they’ll read them, but I just hope that I can avoid a situation where all of my life’s experiences will someday become stories with no point. Enjoy.

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.